Trek through the colours of Korea

Press, 18 March 1989, Page 27

Trek through the colours of Korea

Korea. A Walk Through the Land of Miracles. By Simon Winchester. Collins, 1988. 238 pp. $42.95. (Reviewed by Phil Osborne) The journey of survivors of a Dutch barque wrecked on the southern coast of Korea on August 16, 1653, provided the author with a template for his 350mile walk nearly 350 years later. Extracts from the account by the ship’s secretary, Hendrick Hamel, introduce each chapter and offer a fascinating comparison; a tantalising, at times frustrating comparison. Winchester accurately describes his “Korea” as “a very modest account.” He weaves snatches of history, politics, economics and sociology through this readable tale of an unusual trek, but leaves the reader wanting to know more, both about modern Korea and Hamel’s Korea. New Zealanders who served in South Korea should not expect too much from this book. They know that “The Land of the Morning Calm” is well on the path to equal, perhaps surpass, Japan as “a land of miracles” but there is little reference to the areas in which they once battled the twin enemies of communists and climate. Uijongbu is mentioned because of its place in history on the classic northern invasion route. Has the oncedreadful and depressing crossroads

city shared in the general economic revival and does it now reflect its traditional name as the “City of Everrighteousness”? Winchester was looking at a different, broader readership; one encouraged by the Seoul Olympics to take an armchair stroll through what was once the Hermit Kingdom. And a pleasant stroll, too, with a reporter who has wrestled with the Korean language (spoken and written) with sufficient success to be able to elicit a variety of information along the way — from a married monk high in a mountain retreat, from eye-witnesses to a massacre at Kwangju, from Mormon missionaries, from industrialists, prostitutes and farmers. Winchester the writer provides the philosophical frills, but in the main it is Winchester the reporter with an eye for detail and for colour — for fields full of gentian and azalea, forsythia, lavender and lilac; for honeymoon rites on Cheju; for a soothing, seductive visit to a traditional Korean hairdresser. The walk start on Cheju Island and continued on up the peninsula to Panmunjom and the demilitarised zone separating North and South Korea. Kimchi pickled cabbage, ginseng, dog soup, snake stew, and powdered deer antler are available along the way; so, too, is apple pie and

custard. Contrasts abound, from rice planters continuing a centuries-long tradition to the technologists of the new society created by industrial giants such as Hyundai, Samsung and Daewoo. Winchester looks at a nation that literally rose from the ashes of ruin. Little more than 30 years before his walk 1.5 M casualties had been claimed in a war that “raged quite pointlessly up and down the playing card-shaped Korean Peninsula.” A truce divided the country in two, separated by barbed wire, minefields and guards, and South Korea, “utterly devastated and demoralised, an emasculated shambles of a country, started shakily to get up on to its feet again.” Along his walk, Winchester reminds readers that, after its first hesitant steps, South Korea gained confidence, picked up momentum, and then started seriously to challenge the world’s industrial leaders through a combination of energy and efficiency, national pride, and Confucian determination. In 1967, the author reported on the construction of the last line of great ships at Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. In Korea he found the new birthplace of the supertanker at Ulsan. Winchester is the “Guardian’s" Pacific region correspondent.